Truly Dust
by Ieyre
Summary: As the world ends, Rumplestiltskin watches with the detached circumspection of a man who has lost everything. He was nothing and he will return to nothing, and he has no one to blame for it but himself-not even Fate. 2x22, Gold's thoughts upon learning of his son's fate. Major angst.


The world splitting at the seams, and yet—the silence in his shop was deafening. Countless treasures littered the shelves, coins rescued from sunken pirate ships gleamed under the glass.

Never had the worthlessness of everything within these four walls been more apparent to him.

Gold wanted numbness—to divest himself of feeling anything and allow his coldest, most rational side to take control. Cora ripping out her heart idly crossed his mind—if he thought he could even muster the strength to perform magic on that scale, he might've tried it. What would it feel like to spend the last few hours of his life as cold and unfeeling as the world believed him?

_The only thing I ever wanted was to protect my son._

But his desires, his dream stretched back even farther, before the Dark One had taken root in him. To that brief period of life when he still believed in himself. _Rumplestiltskin's Hopeful Period_. Like Picasso's Blue Period—the punchline of a joke only he understood. They could frame it and mount it and stick it in a museum today and not a living soul would see art in the morning.

All he'd ever wanted was to be a father—a good father. The father he'd never had.

At the last, he'd succeeded in spades. His father at least had the courtesy to die.

Lacey's half empty bottle of scotch sat on his work table, only a few inches away from his left hand. How much of that amber liquid would it take to forget who he was? Hand shaking, he reached for it—gripping the peeling label like an iron vise. He picked it up and slammed it down so hard on the table that its glass bottom shattered. The desire for self-punishment beat out the need for oblivion.

They needed his help…they needed magic. Of course they did. Magic was his curse—the beginning and the end for him. It was the soul thing against which the value of his very existence would be measured.

And he'd only really wanted it to save Bae.

_And to keep him, to have him, to hold him, because he was the one wholly good thing in your life, the only person who was truly _yours_, but the tighter and more desperately you held onto him the less you had him, the more he pulled away until finally—_

_You let go._

Magic was supposed to make him strong, to protect Baelfire from dying in war. It had only frightened him, and driven a wedge between them—driven him away. Rumplestiltskin used every magical trick there was to find him, had used it to sink to the basest a man could sink and still call himself a man. Self-justification, hundreds of years of it, fell apart, like the cogs of the broken clock on the shelf at his shoulder, a useless, ultimately futile jumble of meaningless parts. Useless and broken.

In the end, it was magic that killed Baelfire.

Milah told him once that for Bae's sake, he could've died.

He imagined the life his son might've had. Milah remarried, in another town—something larger, a port city full of the promise of exotic food and the smell of the sea, something to slake her wanderlust. A new father for her son—strong and bold, a man worthy of his brave and good-hearted boy. Carefree, this imagined Bae has a spirit for justice. He grows up in comfort and in the arms of people who love him, something he wishes to bring to others—which he does, through marrying and having children of his own. He is a born leader, fighter, and all who know him are better for it.

He never gives a second thought to Rumplestiltskin, the father who died before he was born (a tragic massacre, they say—the Ogres killed his entire battalion.) That's because there's nothing to think of.

His Bae had died knowing just how weak a man he was. The truth, his final gift.

In a few hours, Storybrooke would evaporate into the air. What magic had made in a puff of smoke it would rip apart—destruction was always easier than creation—the adage, he noticed with some irony, was a good candidate for his epitaph. The roads would crack, the buildings collapse. His curse would save the inhabitants of the town for last. Everything would crumble and be swept away in the wind.

Then, at last, he would truly be dust.


End file.
